Quake

File:Quake1cover.jpg

Quake box art

Quake or QuakeWorld?

When Quake initially launched its netcode was not optimized for the dial-up connections of the time, and so consequently QuakeWorld was created, a separate exe for the game which was multiplayer only with adjusted physics and severely revamped netcode. As personal internet connections improved, the original Quake protocol became more relevant. Now there is a divide as to which to play. Serious competitive players are very sensitive to the differences between them, however for the starting out player the differences will be barely noticeable, and the experienced but more casual players play whichever, simply going for servers where a fun time can be had.

For starting out, go with whatever your engine of choice supports and then explore the other as you wish. This can be simplified by using DarkPlaces which will connect to either.

Where To Buy

Steam - Steam regards it as Windows only, but there are many engine modifications which let you play the game on OSX or Linux, and the community particularly supports the latter.

Getting Started

Quake is primarily played with modified engines which make use of modern technology and operating systems. Installing them is as simple as extracting them into the same folder you can find WinQuake.exe and running the modified engine's exe. For multiplayer all you need is to pull down the console (~) and type "connect <server address or ip>".

Many modern engines have a setting for mouse looking in their options menu, but if it doesn't exist you can enable it from the console by entering +mlook. The plus sign in front of the mlook' is a modifier that means "enable". You can disable it later with -mlook.

From the options menu, you may also want to set Always Run to On and set Lookstrafe and Lookspring to Off.

Widescreen and FOV

By default Quake doesn't have any widescreen support and while it can use some widescreen resolutions, it will not adjust the FOV for them. The default is 90 degrees horizontal FOV for 4:3, so for a 16:9 or 16:10 aspect ratio this must be increased to 106 or 100. Of course since many players like to play with an increased FOV even in 4:3, you may set it to 110, 115, etc. Some engines will provide automatic adjustment of the FOV so when you set the FOV to 90 (for example), the engine will adjust it to 106 (for 16:9).

Changing the FOV is as simple as opening the console and typing fov n where n is the new FOV. Keep in mind that extreme FOV values may have negative side effects on the game's display.

Some engines will not save your screen settings, so you may want to modify the executable shortcut or launcher settings (see below) to specify the resolution you want. All Quake engines accept the -bpp and -width parameters for specifying the bits per pixel and horizontal resolution. Most engines also support the -height parameter for vertical resolution. If you want to set a console variable (such as fov), you can put a + in front of it.

An example for the QuakeSpasm engine would be:

quakespasm.exe -width 1920 -height 1080 -bpp 32 +fov 106

Installing and Using Mods

Mods are accessed via an amendment system, where you tell the engine where to look first for game data, and then it falls back to the default subfolder (id1) for the base game. Simply extract a mod into a subfolder inside of \Quake\ where the subfolder root will either have a progs.dat file, or a .pak or .pk3 file. You load the mod with a command line appending of "-game <folder containing the mod>", for example if you wished to run the DarkPlaces engine and the DarkPlaces mod, it would be something along the lines of "c:\Quake\darkplaces.exe -game dpmod".

Keep in mind that DarkPlaces fixes a few bugs with the Quake engine that break compatibility with some mods and can result in unplayable maps (unreachable items floating in the air, enemies falling out of the world, etc). Also many modern Quake mods and maps break the limitations of the original Quake engine by using more enemies, items or scripting commands. Usually the modern mods mention which engine or engines they are compatible with.

Installing and Playing Custom Maps

Inside of the id1 folder create a folder named "maps", extract the archive (usually a BSP and a text file) into id1\maps. Launch the game with your preferred menu and in the console type "map <name of the bsp file without the extension>". For example if you wanted to play Matt Sefton's classic map Jawbreaker, you would type: "map jawbreak". You can also have a map be loaded immediately from the command line with "+map jawbreak". The plus is stuffing a console command and its values into the initial engine execution, allowing you to do things like specify a map as well as a difficulty, or connect immediately to a server.

Maps which require mods should be placed inside of a folder named "maps" inside of the mod's folder.

Installers and Launchers

Quake Injector: Automatic Installer for Mods and Maps

Quake Injector is a Java-based client for the Quaddicted single player map and mod database that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It provides the ability to install and uninstall maps and mods (with their requirements/dependencies) from the site directly on Quake with a single click and includes information about each mod, such as release data, rating (from the Quaddicted editor), title, authors, a brief description (from the editor) and screenshot. Also it can (with varying levels of success) figure out if there are known maps already installed.

Quake Injector does not provide access to every map released for Quake (it has no support for multiplayer maps, for example, unless they come as part of a singleplayer map pack or they are singleplayer maps in addition to multiplayer), but it is very close to that and provides an easy method to try new maps and mods.

Please note that under Linux (and maybe Mac OS X, depending on the file system) many older maps will need manual editing of their filenames because the original files contained mixed case or upper case letters.

MiniQL

MiniQL is a small Quake launcher that provides an easy front-end to running any user map or original map by scanning Quake and mod archive files (PAK files) and displaying all maps to select from. It can also be used to supply default variables (such as fov) and screen resolution when starting the

MiniQL can be downloaded from here.

CD Music

The original game had music in audio CD format which is still supported by most engines. However keeping the CD in the tray can wear out an already very old disc and many people play the game without music. Also the Steam version of Quake does not include any music. A solution to these issues is to rip the music from the original CD (or download the music from the Internet for the Steam version - look in the Steam Quake forum for more information) and burn it in a new CD. When burning make sure that you also add a data track (just put some random file in there) because the game expects that the first track contains the game's files.

A more convenient solution is to use QuakeSpasm or DarkPlaces (see below), which have support for OGG music playback (QuakeSpasm also supports MP3 playback, but for compatibility reasons with mods that require the DarkPlaces engine it is recommended to use OGG). To install the music for these games simply convert the tracks to OGG format and name them trackXX.ogg (where XX is a zero padded number like 02, 03, etc) and place them in the id1/music directory under your Quake directory (for example C:\Quake\id1\music).

Recommended Engines

• QuakeSpasm - QuakeSpasm is a descendant of FitzQuake and like that engine, it focuses on fixing bugs and stability, lifting engine limits such as maximum items and geometry detail and restoring the missing functionality that the original software renderer had but the OpenGL renderer lacked. Unlike many other engines, QuakeSpasm does not alter the style of the original game and doesn't fix game-changing bugs that affects mods. It runs under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
• DarkPlaces - Though there are many engines for many needs out there, DarkPlaces is a common one for new players due to its support for modern Windows environments, Linux, and OSX along with modern graphical features such as realtime shadowmaps, bloom, and normalmapping. It also supports both the netQuake, and QuakeWorld networking protocols, as well as its own. It scales well on visual effects from the modern to the classic and sports a fast rendering for modern GPUs. It has some problems with mods that depend on the original Quake's bugs that the engine has fixed.
• DirectQ - DirectQ is a Direct3d oriented engine with a few tweaks to the menu but little to graphical improvements, it simply runs on DirectX instead of OpenGL. It mostly resembles the classic look, but performs excellently.
• FTEQuakeWorld - FTEQuakeWorld is targeted at QuakeWorld players while adding support for other Quake engine games, it features enhanced visuals, voice chat support, and better modding capability for QuakeWorld servers.

Community

• Quaddicted - Great collection of categorized and rated single player maps as well as a ton of general information and history.
• Inside3d - The modder hub, QuakeC tutorials and an active forum.
• Func_Msgboard - The mapper hub, new map releases, technique improvements.
• QuakeOne - Original network style multiplayer hub, player community.
• QuakeWorld nu - QuakeWorld multiplayer hub, competitive player community.
• Quake Brasil - Brazilian Quake player hub.